The Entertainment Software Association doesn’t want anyone to restore the functionality of older videogames that are no longer supported by their publisher, because, says ESA, this is “hacking,” and all hacking is “associated with piracy.”

As the devices in our homes get "smarter," are they also going to spy on us? That question has led to one sentence in Samsung's SmartTV privacy policy getting a lot of attention lately:

Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.

When you buy a video game, you expect to be able to play it for as long as you want. You expect be able to play it with your kids many years from now if you want (well, maybe not Grand Theft Auto). And you would hope that museums and media historians could preserve the games that were so important to your childhood. But unfortunately, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s anti-circumvention provisions (17 U.S.C. § 1201, or Section 1201) creates legal risks for players who want to keep playing after game servers shut down, and curators who want to preserve games for posterity. That’s why I’m spearheading an effort to win legal protection for game enthusiasts and preservationists who want to keep abandoned games alive by running multiplayer servers or eliminating authentication mechanisms.

Last week, Google announced that its Youtube service would default to using HTML5 video instead of Flash. Once upon a time, this would have been cause for celebration: after all, Flash is a proprietary technology owned by one company, a frequent source of critical vulnerabilities that expose hundreds of millions of Internet users to attacks on their computers and all that they protect, and Flash objects can only be reliably accessed via closed software, and not from free/open code that anyone can inspect.

As the White House reacted to the drone crash with a call for more regulation, the manufacturer of the downed quadcopter announced it would push a firmware update to all its units in the field, permanently preventing those drones from taking off or flying within 25km of downtown Washington DC.